The Departments of English and Music announce a once-in-a-lifetime event coming to the University of Mississippi campus, as world-class performer Benjamin Bagby will sing the Old English epic poem Beowulf live, accompanied by Anglo-Saxon harp, on Thursday, October 31st at 7:30pm in Nutt Auditorium. Mr. Bagby’s stunning reconstruction of this medieval work (accompanied by modern English supertitles) has been performed in concert from Carnegie Hall to Munich to Bruges, and has earned rave reviews from the San Francisco Chronicle, the Berkshire Review for the Arts, and the New York Times, which writes: “Mr. Bagby comes as close to holding hundreds of people in a spell as ever a man has…that is much too rare an experience in theater.”

Additionally, Mr. Bagby has generously agreed to discuss his craft of performing oral poetry and medieval music theory in a lecture entitled “Beowulf and the Anglo-Saxon scop: A Visit to the Workshop of ‘A Singer of Tales,’” which will be held Wednesday, October 30th at 4:00pm in Nutt Auditorium. Through the generous support of the University of Mississippi Lecture Series, the Department of Music, the Department of English, UM Opera Theatre, the Medieval Studies Minor, and Mr. Bagby himself, this event will be free of charge and open to the University of Mississippi community and the public. For additional information, please contact Julia Aubrey (jaubrey@olemiss.edu) or Lindy Brady (lmbrady@olemiss.edu).

Melanie Benson Taylor (Herring Pond Wampanoag), Associate Professor of Native American Studies at Dartmouth University will deliver her lecture, “What Was Native American Literature? Tribalism, Regionalism, and Comparativism, in the Age of Globalization” on November 28 at 6p.m. at The Depot.

Melanie Benson Taylor is a literary critic who specializes in U.S. Southern studies. She explored the intersections of Native, African American, white, and immigrant southern cultures in her first two books: Disturbing Calculations: The Economics of Identity in Postcolonial Southern Literature, 1912-2002 (2008) and Reconstructing the Native South: American Indian Literature and the Lost Cause (2012). She continues to examine the effects of economic anxiety on the construction of cultural identity and borders in two new books projects: Faulkner’s Doom interrogates the use of Indian tropes in William Faulkner’s modern South, and Indian Killers uncovers the phenomenon of violence and murder in texts by and about contemporary Native Americans.

Megan Abbott is the award-winning author of six novels, includingThe End of Everything and Dare Me. She is also the author of TheStreet Was Mine, a study of hardboiled fiction and film noir, and the editor of A Hell of a Woman, a female crime fiction anthology. Her writing has appeared in the publications including the New York Times, Salon and the Los Angeles Times Magazine and her stories have appeared in multiple anthologies. Her upcoming novel, The Fever, will come out in June 2014.

Erin Drew specializes in environmental criticism and the literature and culture of the long eighteenth century. Her research interests include eighteenth-century poetry, environmental history, animal studies, and the depiction of non-human nature and science in literature. Her dissertation, “The Usufructuary Enlightenment: Environmental Thought in Eighteenth-Century Literature,” explores the role of the legal concept of usufruct in shaping the relationships among humans and nature in the eighteenth century. She is currently revising it for publication.

Ian Whittington specializes in twentieth-century British and Anglophone literature and culture, in particular the cultural production of mid-century Britain. His book, Writing the Radio War: Literature, Politics and the BBC, 1939-1945 (University of Edinburgh Press, forthcoming late 2017)considers the involvement of British writers in Second World War broadcasting in the context of wartime debates about political and cultural identity, including debates about the relationship of Britain to its empire. His broader research and teaching interests include modern and contemporary British and Anglophone fiction, radio and sound studies, twentieth century British poetry, war literature, and postcolonial studies.

Education

Ph.D., English, McGill University (2013)

M.A., English, McGill University (2007)

B.A., English, University of British Columbia (2001)

Teaching and Research Interests

20th-century British literature

20th-century World Anglophone literature

Cultural Studies

Radio Studies/Sound Studies

Selected Publications

Writing the Radio War: Literature, Politics and the BBC, 1939-1945 (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming late 2017)